L-R, Henry Bruner, Roy Fitzgerald, Glenn Traer, experts at milking electric transit systems.
Plundering Electric Railways in Illinois & Wisconsin
The world economic crisis of 2007-2008 was triggered by sleazy finance whizes shuffling subprime mortgage packages.
Similarly, our screwed-up transportation systems were the result of clever wheeler-dealers plundering electric railways.
General Motors’ Alfred Sloan couldn’t have this: one of the world’s fastest electric intercity railways operating in America’s heartland. Not when you could get control and pick its bones, for cheap!
The Chicago, North Shore and Milwaukee Railroad (the North Shore Line, NSL) ran electric trains between the biggest cities of Illinois and Wisconsin. Downtown-downtown Windy City-Milwaukee took about two hours, 38 times a day. The railbed was well engineered and carefully maintained.
In 1941, two state-of-the-art trains called Electroliners, made by St. Louis Car, came into service. These air-conditioned babies were smooth, powerful and beautiful, inside and out. Styling was by the architecture and design firm James F. Eppenstein Associates. NSL promoted the heck out of the fancy new trains, and riders loved ’em.
Because of WWII, General Motors front company National City Lines was swimming in profit from running transit operations across the US. Over 1943-46, a number of people connected with General Motors picked up eight million dollars worth of NSL stock for just $900,000 in cash. (The railroad, struggling with automobiles stealing its passengers and trucks nabbing freight business, was in bankruptcy.)
Public Service Coordinated Transport of New Jersey, 4th-biggest transit system in the US, was a General Motors fiefdom for decades.
Controlling Joisey with Caddie-Bribes!
According to Edson Tennyson—a Virginia engineer and former assistant secretary of the Pennsylvania state Dept. of Transportation—General Motors used the annual bribe of a new Cadillac to get effective control of the biggest transit firm in New Jersey.
Every year, GM would come to New Jersey and set up Public Service Coordinated Transport’s plan for the upcoming twelve months. Naturally, this would involve getting rid of streetcars (except in Newark’s short subway), and putting in GM buses. Then Al Creamer, special liaison between PSCT and the state’s public service commision, would head back to Flint, Michigan, pick up a new Cadillac and drive it back to Newark to present to PSCT’s transit manager.
Besides getting rid of New Jersey’s tram system, GM had a near-monopoly on bus sales. Over the years 1935-1971, PSCT bought 7,059 buses. Of these, 6,475, or 91.7%, were made by General Motors. A pretty good lock on the market for the cost of one snazzy car per year.
An annual car like this 1938 Cadillac Town Sedan would have been a small investment for GM to sell thousands of buses.
Ripping out tram tracks on Manhattan in 1935/36 was the #1 most important step in America’s freeway transformation.
We’ll Nuke Manhattan
In 1925, General Motors wanted into bus manufacturing, so it arranged a big stock swap with successful Chicago bus and taxi entrepreneur John Hertz. (Hertz was interested in GM’s heavy truck division).
Alfred Sloan’s company didn’t just get control of a big bus manufacturer, but a major transit operator as well, Omnibus, that ran bus lines in Chicago, St. Louis and New York.
In 1926, Omnibus quietly bought New York Railways, the biggest tram company on Manhattan, and set up a straightforwardly-named Street Railways Liquidating Corporation to do the massive track-removal job.
Even so, it took nearly a decade to jump the regulatory hoops. By the end of 1936, though, Manhattan’s biggest tram system was toast.
The Big Apple had two other huge streetcar systems-Third Ave. Railway and Brooklyn and Queens Transit. But the backroom dealing to dispose of them was well under way.
The Brooklyn Dodgers’ name came from the huge tram network that was sometimes difficult to dodge around.
This disturbing General Motors film tried to make the Philadelphia bus conversion look like a space-agy transformation. Just like the Jetsons! It failed.
Real Creepy Movie
Want some hyper-peculiar viewing? This GM propaganda deserves a special place among old ads and films saying dodgy things: “Smoking is good for you! Drink water infused with radium!”
In contrast, a film produced in Melbourne in the same era trumpeted the virtues of trams, pointing out how they made far more efficient use of downtown streets than cars.
The film’s narrator politely asks an automobile driver, if a tram containing 90 passengers is taken off the road, where will they those people go?
Today, the Aussie city is consistently voted the world’s most livable, and the trams are a basic part of its charm.
Below, shortly after GM’s flick, the Melbourne transit board produced a film saying the exact opposite of Diesels and Dollars.
